I get asked a lot, usually by clients who’ve tried other approaches and found them slow or overwhelming, whether there’s a way to treat trauma without having to relive it in detail session after session. For a specific and fairly wide range of presentations, there is and it’s the reason I trained in the Rewind Technique through IARTT, the International Association for Rewind Trauma Therapy.
Rewind was developed by Dr. David Muss, who first published it in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology back in 1991, after using it with a group of police officers dealing with post-traumatic stress. It’s a guided imagery and relaxation-based technique, and the idea behind it is fairly simple to state, even though the effect can be quite profound to witness: traumatic memories that keep intruding as flashbacks, nightmares, sudden physical reactions to a trigger are, in a sense, stuck in a part of the brain that keeps replaying them as if they’re still happening. Rewind works with the memory in a structured, dissociated way, helping the brain “file” the event properly, so it becomes something you can recall voluntarily, on your own terms, rather than something that intrudes on you involuntarily.
One of the things I value most about this approach, and the reason I offer it to certain clients before other options, is what IARTT calls closure without disclosure. You do not need to describe the traumatic event to me in detail for this to work. That matters enormously for people who’ve been re-traumatized by having to recount their story over and over in other settings, and it matters just as much for people who feel they simply can’t say the words out loud yet. The processing happens without you needing to narrate what happened.
People sometimes assume trauma work is only for those who directly experienced an event. In my experience, that’s too narrow a view, and it’s something Rewind is well suited to address. IARTT’s own framework distinguishes between different kinds of exposure to a traumatic event someone who lived through it directly, someone who witnessed it happen, someone who arrived afterward and pieced together what must have occurred, and someone who only heard about it secondhand and imagined it. That last group is often the most overlooked in trauma conversations, but I’ve worked with people relatives, colleagues, emergency responders who arrived after the fact whose nervous systems reacted just as strongly to an event they didn’t directly witness as if they had. Rewind doesn’t require you to have been the “main” victim of an event for it to be a legitimate and effective avenue of treatment.
The technique isn’t limited to what most people think of as classic PTSD. I use it regularly for specific phobias too, for example flying, injections, driving after an accident, medical procedures because the underlying mechanism is similar. A single frightening incident, or a memory the brain has filed as “still dangerous,” can drive a phobic response for years. Rewind can often address this in a small number of sessions, sometimes as few as one to three for a single-incident trauma or phobia, though more complex or repeated trauma understandably takes longer.
I’ll usually start with some grounding and relaxation work before we do anything else, so your body has a genuine sense of safety in the room before we approach the memory at all. From there, the process uses guided imagery to work with the memory at a distance you’re not asked to sit inside the emotional intensity of the original event the way you might in some exposure-based approaches. Many clients describe feeling that “something has shifted” without being able to fully articulate what, until they notice, out in the world, that a trigger which used to derail them no longer does.
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